Post by bladecruiser on Jun 12, 2015 21:51:15 GMT

So there were quite a few complaints in the races I did today about stuttering or frame rate lag, so I figured I'd make up a quick thread with some of the things I've done to keep my computer's performance at a relatively high mark while playing.

1 - Turn down your graphics settings. Yes, I know, PC master race and all that jazz. But you can't race if you're hopping all over the damn place. Shadows are a big culprit, as are reflections. Drop those down, give the game a restart, and see if it helps. Distance scaling, pedestrian variety, etc, also can be massive hits on processing power. It is worth noting here that you should leave Texture Quality at High, since the way the game deals with lower settings is to dynamically scale them down from this point. Yes, it's dumb, but that's how it works.

2 - Check if you have your Self Radio enabled. There's two things to do here - the radio station actually being on and playing, and the game scanning constantly for new tracks. Both of these need to be disabled to get the best performance increases. This may or may not affect you, though, so try it and if it helps, awesome.

3 - Vsync settings. A lot of time the issue with stuttering is because of fluctuations in the frame rate of the game whenever something is happening, like a crash or bump, even if you aren't involved. You'll want to experiment with your graphics card's control panel and see which vsync setting gives you the smoothest experience. Some can set it to match their monitor's refresh rate, some have to go lower. You can also put a frame limiter on with some cards, which will help even more. Whatever you do, DONT use the ingame vsync. It is terrible and will not help beyond capping your frame rate. It might even cause more issues.

4 - DirectX version. Some people have better performance with DirectX 11, others are better off with DirectX 10 or 10.1. Experiment and see which one works best for you.

Now we get into some of the more technical aspects of tweaking the game. This involves messing with the settings file and changing some of the settings within it, so if you're going to do this, make sure you make a copy of the file somewhere else before you make any changes so that if something gets borked, you can just replace it with the copy and be back to where you started with it working.

You can find the settings file in your documents folder, inside the "Rockstar Games/GTA V/" folder. It is just settings.xml, and you can edit it by right clicking the file and clicking Edit on the drop down.

1 - <Shadow_ParticleShadows value="true" /> This will be the best bang for your buck here. Change it to "false" and it gets rid of the shadows on tire smoke, the fire from explosions, the blades of grass and clouds of dirt from driving offroad. All stuff that you generally won't worry about having shadows anyways.

2 - <Lighting_FogVolumes value="true" /> Another big one for frame rate improvement. Change it to "false" and it will make the fog effects basically transparent and not be touched by the lighting engine, freeing up tons of resources for other things. This will have a visible effect on tracks like Blaine County 24h where fog is a common sight, but generally isn't that big a detraction from the visuals of the game for the amount of performance increases you get from it.

3 - <ReflectionQuality value="1" /> This will have some serious visual changes, but it will help with performance fairly significantly. Change it to "0" and basically the reflections will only be light source blurs and not be what's physically around your vehicles or wherever the reflections will be. It ties directly into the next setting, as well, so if you're changing this, might as well change the next too.

4 - <Reflection_MipBlur value="true" /> This is the reflection maps that attach reflections to objects. Setting this to "false" disables reflections entirely, which will give you a massive boost in performance with the trade off that the game will start to look like GTA3.

5 - <ShadowQuality value="1" /> This is the Big One. Changing this to "0" will be like night and day in terms of frame rate increases on some systems. But, you will complete the transformation of this game from GTA5 to GTA3. Textures will appear flat, dark alley ways will be flooded with light, and so on and so forth. Turning it off to see just how many shadows there are in the game was an eye opener for me.

So, hopefully some of this helps some of the stuttering issues that people have been experiencing! If anyone has any other tips or tricks with helping boost just a bit more performance out of the game, post them here and spread the knowledge around!

Post by method0ne on Jun 15, 2015 8:32:49 GMT

To add to this, I know a few people on PC either stream or record their gameplay, so here's a couple of things that might make a difference..

When streaming, once you know that your stream looks ok, turn the preview off on both the Twitch dashboard and in your streaming program of choice, doing this in many games that are heavily cpu/gpu dependent can be the difference between a slideshow in game and smooth performance.

When recording, if your program of choice has a preview mode, again, turn the preview off once you know that it looks ok.

Also when recording, try to make sure you're recording footage to a different drive than the one the game is stored on, with how the game handles loading textures/objects/terrain by streaming from the drive it can be drastically impaired if you're also trying to write to the drive at the same time, especially with programs like Fraps which record uncompressed.

Post by cloudmcshort on Aug 24, 2015 18:20:03 GMT

Also when recording, try to make sure you're recording footage to a different drive than the one the game is stored on, with how the game handles loading textures/objects/terrain by streaming from the drive it can be drastically impaired if you're also trying to write to the drive at the same time, especially with programs like Fraps which record uncompressed.

Might sound stupid but is it possible to move my GTA files (essentially, the game) to another drive without re-installing? I currently have it on my HDD because my SSD was too full, but I can move stuff over.

Post by ryosuke on Aug 24, 2015 18:34:44 GMT

another thing that helped me a lot was turning off completely antivirus, and go to system-proprieties-advanced system settings select advanced tab and on "performance" hit settings then select adjust for better performance.Be sure to set in your gpu settings (ati catalyst or equivalent for nvidia) texture and related stuff to performance.

even a bit of cpu overclock can do his job. i got my q6600 from 2.4 to stable 3.2 on air and i can tell the difference. Moreover, lower resolution do not always means more fps. In my case the difference can't be seen between 1024x768 and 1920x1080

Post by method0ne on Aug 25, 2015 15:26:28 GMT

Also when recording, try to make sure you're recording footage to a different drive than the one the game is stored on, with how the game handles loading textures/objects/terrain by streaming from the drive it can be drastically impaired if you're also trying to write to the drive at the same time, especially with programs like Fraps which record uncompressed.

Might sound stupid but is it possible to move my GTA files (essentially, the game) to another drive without re-installing? I currently have it on my HDD because my SSD was too full, but I can move stuff over.

Yes, and it's actually a whole lot easier than you might think thanks to Steam Mover.

Download the program, tell it what you want to move, tell it where to put it, and it'll do everything for you, then simply start the game as you normally would.

And before anyone asks, this works with any game and not just your Steam ones.

Post by cloudmcshort on Aug 25, 2015 15:54:02 GMT

Might sound stupid but is it possible to move my GTA files (essentially, the game) to another drive without re-installing? I currently have it on my HDD because my SSD was too full, but I can move stuff over.

Yes, and it's actually a whole lot easier than you might think thanks to Steam Mover.

Download the program, tell it what you want to move, tell it where to put it, and it'll do everything for you, then simply start the game as you normally would.

And before anyone asks, this works with any game and not just your Steam ones.

First i went on system - advanced system settings - performance settings - adjust for best performance

Then i did everything said here

except for the commandline file and the virtual memory thing. Basically because i was getting stuttering while running on crossfire, everything was fine on a single gpu.Then you must disable ULPS, just google it you'll find everything you need. Basically you just need to manually change a parameter with regedit.i did a clean driver installation with ati beta drivers.i then deleted any custom GTA5 profile on CCC and left everything on default settings.Then i went on CCC and manually downgraded the asus gpu to 775mhz matching the second one so that both memory and gpu clock were the same.At this point i just launched GTA5, no windowed mode, 1920x1080 with everything on normal it is playable with a minimum of 40 fps. Im very low on ram anyway, so at the beginning of any race i get bad fps drop + lag and stuttering for a few seconds.To fix that, i just bought a new 2x2gb ram kit on amazon for 35euros, different brand but same clock and same cas, same voltages aswell so the exact same ram with a different brand on it (i still took a good brand, g.skill)

I think what was causing me issues was first ulps, then windowed mode and ati drivers aswell. That way i was monitoring the 2nd gpu activity with MSI afterburner but i read somewhere that windowed mode do not work with crossfire. Everything else i did was just to improve pc performance in order to get more fps.

The last thing, i enable intel XMP profile on my bios. Tomorrow im gonna get my new rams and i'll let you know if there's any improvements.

If you feel the car perfectly under control , it means that you're not going fast enough.

First i went on system - advanced system settings - performance settings - adjust for best performance

Then i did everything said here

except for the commandline file and the virtual memory thing. Basically because i was getting stuttering while running on crossfire, everything was fine on a single gpu.Then you must disable ULPS, just google it you'll find everything you need. Basically you just need to manually change a parameter with regedit.i did a clean driver installation with ati beta drivers.i then deleted any custom GTA5 profile on CCC and left everything on default settings.Then i went on CCC and manually downgraded the asus gpu to 775mhz matching the second one so that both memory and gpu clock were the same.At this point i just launched GTA5, no windowed mode, 1920x1080 with everything on normal it is playable with a minimum of 40 fps. Im very low on ram anyway, so at the beginning of any race i get bad fps drop + lag and stuttering for a few seconds.To fix that, i just bought a new 2x2gb ram kit on amazon for 35euros, different brand but same clock and same cas, same voltages aswell so the exact same ram with a different brand on it (i still took a good brand, g.skill)

I think what was causing me issues was first ulps, then windowed mode and ati drivers aswell. That way i was monitoring the 2nd gpu activity with MSI afterburner but i read somewhere that windowed mode do not work with crossfire. Everything else i did was just to improve pc performance in order to get more fps.

The last thing, i enable intel XMP profile on my bios. Tomorrow im gonna get my new rams and i'll let you know if there's any improvements.

wait a sec.. you're running x16 x4? That might be the problem. That's not a good sharing mobo my friend^^